Well there were some big announcements today for the forward progress of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Last.fm. As two major mobile phone makers, Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) the makers of iPhone and Blackberrys had announcements that are bringing the fast paced world of social networking to their phones.
RIM announced a special partnership for their Blackberry brand and MySpace. It’s a special deal that will bring the MySpace community front and center to the Blackberry brand as they look to expand beyond their business executive crowd. The Blackberry brand will also be bringing a community page to MySpace for all their Blackberry customers to keep up on all the latest Blackberry news. RIM made some other interesting announcements as well. The first Blackberry flip phone and the integration of Ticketmaster for all Blackberry users to be able to search and buy tickets directly from their Blackberry.
The other major announcement came from Yahoo who are in a battle with Google to get their applications out to the Mobi web as fast as they can. The latest attempt from Yahoo to one up the Google gang comes in the form of a free new preview app for the fast growing iPhone crowd. The app is called OneConnect and they are calling it an address book to all your social networks in one place. It will work off a feed from 4 of the biggest social networks MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Last.fm. The highlight of the OneConnect app is a feature called Pulse which will work off the feed to give you a single aggregated view of all the activities of your social networking buddies. The iPhone will be getting the initial release of this new app but Yahoo hopes to have it out to other companies and countries by the end of the year.
So the race continues for Mobi market dominance. In 2007 there were an estimated 80 million people worldwide using the mobile web. That number is expected to reach 800 million in the next 5 years. That is a whole new advertising, marketing and networking market just waiting to be exploited. Will Google continue it’s online dominance from the Internet to the mobi web? What are your thoughts on the huge new potential that lies before us as the mobi web gets faster and more capable of moving massive amounts of data signals. Is the mobi web the the next evolution of the Internet? Please share your opinions and thanks for reading.
